Includes the complete script, lryics and stills Interview with executive
music producer T. Bone Burnett Introduction by muic historian Elijah
Wald Quintessential Coen brothers fare - but different. Inside Llewyn
Davis has a certain kinship with Les MisÉrables. In it, almost all the
principal actors - Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake -
sing. While not quite a musical, Inside Llewyn Davis is built around
full-length performances of folk songs that were heard in the grubby
cafes of the Village in a year when Bob Dylan, who kind of, sort of
shows up in the movie, had just appeared on the scene. Bob Dylan, Paul
Clayton, the Rev. Reverend Gary Davis, Joni Mitchell, Tom Paxton and
myriad other singers of the era are invoked in the film. Its story
bounces through actual places like Gerde's, the Gaslight CafÉ and the
Gate of Horn in Chicago without explicitly portraying real artists or
folk music powers like the impresario Albert Grossman. Working with the
producer Scott Rudin, their collaborator on both True Grit and No
Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers shot the film in New York City
and elsewhere last year and finished the movie at their own pace. They
could have rushed it into the Oscar season but chose to bide their time.
T. Bone Burnett, who provided the old time music of O Brother, Where Art
Thou?, also produced the music for Inside Llewyn Davis. Mr. Burnett has
helped to re-create the brief flowering of a folk scene that in the
early '60s made Washington Square and its environs an unlikely
crossroads for musical influences from Appalachia, the Deep South, the
Far West, New England - almost anywhere but New York's neighborhoods,
from which some of its heartiest practitioners, and Llewyn Davis,
arrived.
